The Age Of Odin

Forty-Two

The squad was strung out in a line, single file, with me at the head, so I didn't myself see what actually sparked off the whole clusterfuck. All I knew was that, suddenly, someone was firing shots, and a frost giant was screeching in agony, and other frost giants were roaring and gibbering, and all kinds of chaos had erupted.

I spun round, and there was a mill of bodies, big and small, frosties and humans. Glassy weapons shone in the sunlight. Guns sparked and spat. Suttung was ordering his guardsmen to stand firm and retaliate. They, for their part, weren't too keen on obeying. Two — no, three — of them were lying on the ground, blood pumping out through shattered ice armour. I glimpsed Paddy and Baz, both down on one knee, blasting away with their assault rifles. Cy and Backdoor were backing off towards the nearest wall, laying down suppressing fire. Chopsticks wasn't immediately in view.

We were in some kind of open-air marketplace, located in a square with an entrance at each corner. Frost giant civilians were screaming and running for cover. Vendors cowered behind their stalls.

Suttung at last got his subordinates marshalled. They mounted a concerted attack, and my lot redoubled their defensive efforts. Me, I was still too stunned to react. I couldn't make sense of how things had gone so pear-shaped so quickly. I heard myself yelling for a ceasefire but nobody could hear me above all the hullabaloo and gunplay, and anyway there were frost giants now coming at us from all directions, so putting up our weapons was not a viable tactic.

Finally I spotted Chopsticks amid the melee. He was crawling towards an open doorway, leaving a huge smear of blood behind him on the ice like a crimson slug-trail. I darted towards him, but a frost giant blocked my way. He had a see-through broadsword in his hands, which he swung and whirled impressively. I unholstered my Glock and took out his left kneecap. I hurdled him as he collapsed, still beelining for Chopsticks.

Somebody else was heading towards him too, unfortunately. A frost giant, and he was much closer than I was. He was equipped with a kind of scythe. It had a reach of at least three metres, and the comma-shaped blade was as long as my arm. I loosed off a couple of rounds at him, but I was going full tilt and my aim was off. Chopsticks wasn't even aware that the bastard was looming over him. He kept on crawling, using elbows and clawed hands, every inch of his progress a hideous, agonised effort. He was half-paralysed, I guessed, his legs useless, some kind of spinal injury, and the doorway was broad and inviting, a promise of sanctuary, of safety…

And then the frost giant with the scythe took a powerful sideways swipe at him and sliced him clean in two at the waist.

"No!" I hit the frost giant running, slamming into him shoulder first. As he went down I double-tapped him in the face with the Glock, point blank range. Hollow-point Parabellum rounds; his brains hit the ground before the rest of him did.

I whirled and sprang to Chopsticks's side, but there were to be no groaned last words from him, no brave smile for his comrade-in-arms. The scythe had left him instantly, utterly, uncompromisingly dead.

I rose shakily. Took stock.

Frost giants were closing in on the other four, who were still in their pairs. Bullets picked off the frosties one by one, but as each fell another lunged in to take his place. We hadn't brought heaps of ammo with us. The guns had been meant for security and show. Nobody had reckoned on needing them for a full-scale ding-dong. I saw Baz toss his Minimi aside, having used up both the magazines he'd had on him. Out came his sidearm, a Browning BDM semiauto. Its clip held fifteen rounds, but after that was empty there'd be no more.

From the way Backdoor was conserving shots with his SA80, I guessed he was running low too.

And more frost giants were piling in from elsewhere. Civilians, unarmoured, were getting in on the act, picking up any handy object and bringing it to the fray.

It was hopeless. Only one thing we could do.

"Fall back!" I called out. "We can't hold position. Fall back!"

The lads heard me and understood, and I jabbed an arm behind me in the direction of the square's south-east corner, which is where we'd been headed before everything went tits up, and I supplied covering fire to allow first Baz and Paddy, then Cy and Backdoor to retreat to the exit there, and they in turned covered me while I joined them.

We scarpered out of the market square down a narrow passageway, with frost giants pursuing us in a howling, irate mob. Shots over our shoulders gave them something to think about but didn't deter them much. We weren't aiming, and mostly all we did was blow a chunk out of the side of someone's house or turn a windowpane into something you'd put in your gin and tonic.

We zigzagged left and right through a maze of side-streets and alleys. I'd no idea if this was the route we'd come in by, although I was 99 % sure it wasn't. Our principal objective was putting distance between us and our pursuers. Beyond that, if we were lucky enough to find our way to the main gate or even just the perimeter wall, that would be a bonus.

"Anybody got a clue what happened back there?" Baz yelled. "Who the bloody fook started firing and why?"

"Save it," I told him. "We can post-mortem later. First let's make sure there's no more mortem to be post."

We rounded a corner and, would you believe it, ran headlong into another bunch of frost giant guards. This lot, four in all, had obviously been alerted by the gunfire that something untoward was up and were rushing to help. We despatched them in pretty short order, but it cost us precious bullets and the delay gave the frosties chasing us time to catch up.

A whirling object whistled past my ear, embedding itself in the wall to my right. One of those ice tomahawks. An inch to the left and I'd have been deaf on both sides; two inches and not being able to hear would have been the least of my concerns.

"Move!" I bellowed, and we moved, leaping over the frost giant bodies in front and scurrying pell-mell along the street. We were in anaerobic mode, like sprinters, sucking in enough air to meet our muscles' demand for oxygen but with nothing to spare. We couldn't keep up this pace much lomger. Cy, the youngest and by far the fittest of us, was racing ahead, but even he would burn out eventually. Flat-out, we were faster than the frosties, nimbler. But they took longer strides, and were generally stronger, with greater levels of endurance. In short, we were managing to stay ahead of them but only just, and we wouldn't be able to maintain our lead indefinitely. When we crapped out they'd be on us in a flash, and once our remaining bullets were spent and our guns were removed from the equation, we stood about as much chance of surviving as I did of sleeping with Jennifer Lopez.

Which might happen, but only in some parallel universe where J.Lo was blind and desperate and I was the last non-impotent man on the planet.

Then salvation appeared ahead, or at any rate a close approximation of it.

Utgard's outer wall.

All we had to do was follow it around, and we'd be at the gate.

Naturally, though, it wasn't going to be that simple. On reaching the wall itself we realised there was no convenient ring road that ran along the inside of it. Buildings butted up hard against its flank in either direction. The street we were on effectively dead-ended with it. Our only chance lay with the set of steep steps that projected out from the wall, leading up to the battlements that crowned it.

I didn't need to give any command. Cy started up the steps, Backdoor went next, and the rest of us were close behind, me taking the rear.

The steps were slippery. Each of us lost his footing several times, not helped by the mob of frosties, who bombarded us with weapons and anything else they could lay their paws on. That was if they weren't following us up the steps, which dozens of them did and which, with their sickle-claw toes gouging into the ice, they made a far better job of than we were making.

In fact, the front runner of them gained on me so fast, and was so close to snaring my heel with one outstretched hand, that I had to stop and turn and expend a bullet on him. His lifeless body thudded heavily into the frost giant behind, knocking him off-balance so that the two of them — one dead, one alive — toppled off the steps and plunged onto the roof of the house below and from there tumbled onto the street. It bought me a few metres' grace, although the Glock's slide had locked back, indicating that the pistol was now as much use as voting Green.

Cy reached the top, gunning down a couple of frosties who came charging towards him along the battlements. Then the rest of us were up there with him, and Paddy took it on himself to defend the steps, crouching with his SA80 set to single shot and planting rounds in the frost giants as they ascended. They could only come up one at a time, so that was fine as far as it went. Paddy could mow them down pretty efficiently, provided he aimed at armour-free parts of their bodies. He didn't have the luxury of missing; if he failed to account for each frost giant with the very first shot, the creature had a chance to get within striking distance, and then he'd be rogered.

Of course, he didn't have an endless supply of ammo, either.

But he stayed there, unhesitating, somehow able to steady his breathing so that each trigger-pull fell in the lull between exhalation and inhalation, and he whittled down the oncoming frosties.

Balls of fucking titanium, that Irishman.

He was only postponing the inevitable, though. He knew it, we all of us knew it. The frost giants would storm the battlements sooner or later.

I scanned both ways. There were watchtowers positioned at intervals all along the battlements, and other sets of steps that gave access up here. Already I could see sentries venturing out from the next watchtower but one, heading for us. There'd be more joining them before too long. I imagined Bergelmir had been informed by now that the delegation from Asgard had, for reasons best known to themselves, betrayed his trust and gone rogue. He'd be hopping mad and sending out every armed man he had with orders to bring back our cocks on sticks.

We had minutes left, if that.

I looked out over the battlements' sharp crenellations and saw a sight that gladdened my heart. But only a little.

The Valkyries were skimming towards us across the ice on their snowmobiles. They'd be at the stronghold's edge in seconds.

Thing was, we were two hundred metres up, and they were down there, and a crevasse yawned between us and them.

The Valkyries were coming to the rescue, but there wasn't actually anything practical they could do to get us out of this shitstorm.